Ranking drops to fast

Selected answers from the Dumb SEO Questions Facebook & G+ community.

• 
  Sean Thurbide: Hi everyone,
  I am very new to this forum and am by no means an SEO expert. It is very daunting and confusing to business owners like me and that is why I hired an outside source to look after our online marketing and SEO requirements in an effort to increase business.
  After 6 months of working with this source, I made arrangements to review the work they had done and see how their work had helped our rankings on Google. I was pleasantly surprised to see that we were ranked in the top 3 organically in 6 of 8 major search terms we had targeted. his report showed this and I was also a witness to it as I pulled up the searches on my own computer and Ipad.
  However, two weeks later, I went to show some of my colleagues our improvement and was stunned to see that we had dropped dramatically in almost every category and no longer ranked in the top 10 of any of the search terms. I am a little suspicious about how fast the rankings could change and wonder if the report I was given was "pumped up" in order to make the marketing look better than it was. Overall I am pretty happy with the work done, but I need to know if I am being overly suspicious or if things can indeed change that fast. Can someone temporarily influence Google organic rankings in an area to get a good showing for their customer? I would appreciate your comments - as I said, I am simply trying to learn how this all works and how I can benefit from your knowledge. Thanks.....
  
• 
  Dave Elliott: I have had a quick look at your site and don't believe there is anything dodgy going on. It was literally a 5 minute look and a quick check of what links are pointing to your site though! Adding lots of irrelevant links is a classic tactic of temporarily increasing rank.
  
  When you say you are no longer in the top 10 how far have you dropped? If you are now 40th or not showing up at all then i'd be a bit suspicious.
  
  When you tested the results how did you test? If you have been on a site previously and often then you are more likely to see that site's results on a SERP (search engine results page) if you were then using a different computer to show your colleagues then you may get very different results. It is much better to use incognito or private browsing when checking rankings.
  
  That said ranking fluctuations do often occur so I wouldn't worry too much about this metric.
  
  Rankings are not the best KPI anyway. It is much better to judge SEO performance on how many quotes you get from the site now compared to 6 months ago or how many people filled out your contact form. Although with this seasonality plays a massive part, so if possible compare year-on-year.(e.g april 2015 compared to april 2016) I'd also have a look at traffic levels to the pages, to see if they have improved (again comparing year-on-year if you have the data).
  
  Rankings while still important, are how you get to your goals rather than the end goal itself. The end goal is for people to engage with your site via your quote form, your contact form or by physically phoning you. Although obviously the latter, as with any other marketing effort is very difficult to track!
  
  To answer your question though, yes it is possible to artificially inflate ranking information temporarily. Other than the browser issue I mentioned earlier there are many dodgy tactics known as "black hat SEO", which could be ultilised to rank better within Google.
  
  These will give you a boost initially but are likely to result in penalties. This could cause the page to drop dramatically within the search engines or even cause the site to be completely deindexed by Google. The answer to my first question and checking for any messages within Google Search Console will likely tell you if this is the case or not. (as i said at the start I don't think this is likely to be the case).
• 
  Suraj Gadage: +Sean Thurbide ;SEO is a long term process that builds on itself and gains momentum in search with time. Hence there is no way to temporarily influence Google organic rankings to please the client.
  
  In your case, you did see an improvement in keyword rankings for yourself and not just relied on the report presented to you. Sometimes you see fluctuation in keyword rankings (but a difference of position one or two). Sudden drop in keyword rankings from top 3 positions to beyond page 1 is worrisome.
  
  There could be a multiple reasons why this happens. But a strong reason could be penalty by Google for doing certain SEO activities that are against Google guidelines.
  
  I would strongly suggest you to check with your agency and ask them to investigate this problem. Let's see what analysis they come up with.
• 
  Sean Thurbide: Thanks for the great info guys....I have informed my agency and they are looking into it. As I said, I am overall pretty happy with the work they do, but wondered why the sudden drop from top three to 15th or lower on all the search terms except 2 of them. I will let you know what they come up with as far as a reason for the drop. Thanks again...
• 
  Jim Munro: Separately from your Agency, you can register your site in Google Search console and then check the manual actions section for a notice from Google. I would do this if you have not done it already.
• 
  Jim Munro: From the expert panel in this week's SEO Questions hangout on air on 00:10:25 into the YouTube video: https://dumbseoquestions.com/q/ranking_drops_to_fast +Sean Thurbide
  
  If our answers were useful to you, please consider assisting us with any or all of the following:
  
  Check our Facebook Page here: https://www.facebook.com/dumbseoquestions/
  
  Please add your G+ review here: https://www.google.com/search?q=Dumb%20SEO%20Questions&ludocid=1541347987741926815#lrd=0x0:0x1563f7d4149ee59f,+1
  
  Please subscribe to our Youtube channnel here: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCCC5ZteEQigCzE-SZkbTMnQ?sub_confirmation=1
  
  Follow our Twitter account here: https://twitter.com/intent/user?screen_name=DumbSeoQs